Skip to main content
Sauce

Melted Butter

A simple sauce made by melting butter, adding a flour-water mixture, and cooking until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Melted Butter

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with the water until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the flour mixture to the melted butter, stirring constantly.

  4. Cook until the sauce thickens, then serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat and rich flavour, and carries the sauce's body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Water
Hydrates the flour so it can be whisked smooth and mixed into the butter.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the butter. Pouring the flour mixture in gradually while stirring constantly keeps lumps from forming. Starch clumps when it hits hot fat or liquid without being dispersed first, so the sauce stays smooth as it thickens.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More melted butter sauce recipes

for Fish 3White 3 See all 103 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes